Author Archives: pappp

Source: Slashdot

In the year 2000, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich answered questions from Slashdot's readers. Late Friday night, the AV Club described Metallica's appearance at the opening ceremonies for the (now online) version of Blizzard Entertainment's annual event BlizzCon: The opening ceremonies were being broadcast online, both through the official BlizzCon page, YouTube, and Twitch. And you know what happens when licensed music gets played on the internet, don't you, folks? That's right: Copyright issues! Per Uproxx, the audio of James, Lars, and the boys' performance apparently went out as per usual on YouTube and the BlizzCon page — although the whole thing appears to have been excised from the YouTube upload of the event. But on Twitch... On Twitch, things did not go so well. Which is to say that, even though it was being hosted on the company's official twitchgaming channel, the performance was ominously preceded by a chyron noting that "The upcoming musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the applicable copyright holder." And then this happened.... Can we prove that someone at Twitch intentionally picked the dorkiest, most Zelda forest-ass music imaginable to have Metallica rock their little hearts out to, instead of broadcasting their extremely copyrighted music (and thus having to deal with the possibility of issuing one of their ubiquitous DMCA takedown notices to themselves)? Obviously not.... On the other hand, we can prove that it is extremely funny to watch this happen, especially — as many people have pointed out — since Metallica is at least partially responsible for the restrictive character of many online musical streaming laws that dominate the internet today, after their high-profile campaign against Napster way back at the dawn of the MP3. In other news, Diablo II is being remastered and re-released later this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Hacker News

Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge (credit: Jayson Photography / Getty Images)

A previously undetected piece of malware found on almost 30,000 Macs worldwide is generating intrigue in security circles, which are still trying to understand precisely what it does and what purpose its self-destruct capability serves.

Once an hour, infected Macs check a control server to see if there are any new commands the malware should run or binaries to execute. So far, however, researchers have yet to observe delivery of any payload on any of the infected 30,000 machines, leaving the malware’s ultimate goal unknown. The lack of a final payload suggests that the malware may spring into action once an unknown condition is met.

Also curious, the malware comes with a mechanism to completely remove itself, a capability that’s typically reserved for high-stealth operations. So far, though, there are no signs the self-destruct feature has been used, raising the question why the mechanism exists.

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Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts

Just one dose of the Moderna and Pfizer two-shot coronavirus vaccines is seemingly nearly as good two.

In a study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, a pair of Canadian-based researchers suggested an amendment to the determined efficacy of the Pfizer vaccines after just one shot. While Pfizer and BioNTech reported their vaccine was just 52.4 percent effective at preventing infection after the first dose, the researchers noted that this data includes results from within the first two weeks after inoculation, "when immunity would have still been mounting." After two weeks, that efficacy mounted to 92.6 percent, matching the first-dose efficacy of 92.1 percent reported from the Moderna vaccine as well. After two doses, the Pfizer vaccine is 95 percent effective, and Moderna's is 94 percent.

The Canadian-based researchers' interpretations of the Pfizer results led them to suggest in the letter that vaccine distributors delay giving people the second dose. This would let distributors get first doses to more at-risk people instead of leaving them "completely unprotected" — something the researchers called "a matter of national security that, if ignored, will certainly result in thousands of COVID-19–related hospitalizations and deaths this winter in the United States."

Another study from January led Pfizer and BioNTech to say Wednesday that they are unsure if the vaccine will be effective at protecting against the B.1.351 variant first found in South Africa. The study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found the vaccine was still capable of neutralizing the virus within the B.1.351 strain, and that trials haven't shown the variant reduces the vaccine's protection in people. Still, the companies may end up creating a booster shot to ensure the vaccine remains effective against the highly transmissible strain.

Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge / News is still very much happening both around the world and in Australia... but you wouldn't know it if you're one of the tens of millions of Australian Facebook users. (credit: Brent Lewin | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

A long-simmering battle between tech firms and the government of Australia became explosive yesterday when Facebook announced that it would block all linking of news publications inside the country. Not only has this change affected Australian and international news publishers, but Facebook's wide net has also caught up governments, nonprofits, and basically anyone else in Australia who posts non-news content to the platform.

Australian lawmakers have been considering a bill that would require Internet platforms such as Google and Facebook ("digital platform corporations") to negotiate in good faith with news outlets ("registered news business corporations") to link to their content. If the outlets and the platforms can't reach a deal on their own, they would have to go to baseball-style arbitration, where a neutral third-party arbitrator would decide whose offer is the better one.

The bill would at first apply to only two companies: Google and Facebook. Both, as you might expect, have expressed consistent opposition to the bill. (Microsoft, operator of remote second-place search engine Bing—which captures between 2 and 3 percent of the market—does not oppose the rules that would apply to its largest competitor.)

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Source: Hacker News

Source: adafruit industries blog

David Given blogs about porting Fuzix, a small V7 Unix clone, to the new Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller:

Working with the Pico was an experience: the documentation is excellent, as is the C SDK. The SDK provides a set of libraries which are thin wrappers around the underlying hardware, making most features utter simplicity to use. Unlike the ESP8266’s libraries, the Pico SDK is unopinionated and doesn’t require you to use any of its features: if you want to talk directly to the hardware, you can (and in fact there’s library support for doing just this).

There are some high-level features like a heap, stdio emulation, multicore primitives, etc which I’m not using, but if you don’t use them you don’t pay for them. For my embedded-systems brain it’s the ideal ratio of functionality to complexity.

The Fuzix port provides:

• user binaries using up to 64kB of code and data each (this could be expanded, as there’s plenty of spare RAM)
• up to 15 processes
• a proper Unix filesystem
• SD card support, used for both the filesystem and swap space
• serial console on UART0
• the full set of Fuzix core binaries work — fsck, Bourne shell, the standard Unix tools, a vi clone, etc, plus some simple games

If you’re looking for the source code, I’m currently upstreaming it piece by piece to the main FUZIX repository. Until that’s done, look in my own fork.

If you just want a binary to flash and try for yourself, here’s one: Raspberry Pi Pico Fuzix binaries

Poorly put-together, bugridden and unsupported Fuzix binaries for the Raspberry Pi Pico. Instructions are enclosed, more or less.

See more in the post here.

Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Last week, a researcher demonstrated a new supply-chain attack that executed counterfeit code on networks belonging to some of the biggest companies on the planet, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla included. Now, fellow researchers are peppering the Internet with copycat packages, with more than 150 of them detected so far.

The technique was unveiled last Tuesday by security researcher Alex Birsan. His so-called dependency confusion or namespace confusion attack starts by placing malicious code in an official public repository such as NPM, PyPI, or RubyGems. By giving the submissions the same package name as dependencies used by companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, and 33 other companies, Birsan was able to get these companies to automatically download and install the counterfeit code.

Automatic pwnage

Dependencies are public code libraries or packages that developers use to add common types of functionality to the software they write. By leveraging the work of thousands of their open source peers, developers are spared the hassle and expense of creating the code themselves. The developer’s code automatically downloads and incorporates the dependency, or any update to it, either from the developer’s local computer or from a public repository.

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